How far does NAND output have to grow in order to supply all our storage devices?

In the 2nd quarter of this year, all five NAND fabs combined to ship about 19 exabytes of NAND, or 19 million terabytes. About 1/3 of this total output went to SSDs, another 1/3 went towards smart phones, and the remaining balance going to tablets, thumb drives, and various other applications.

If we make some rough assumptions, we can assume almost 80 EBs of NAND will ship this year. If you compare this to HDDs, which will ship about 500 EBs this year, it’s equals only 16% of the total HDD exabytes for the year. Looking at it another way, 100% of this year’s NAND output (which would leave no NAND for any other application) would only equal approximately 13 million 6TB HDDs.

So, it is evident that there is not enough NAND supply to take over all the storage requirements in the world at this point, and without any new fab factories slated to come online soon, there will not be sufficient supply for quite some time. And this is even without considering the booming data creation outlook related to IoT!!